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BOQUILLAS HOT SPRINGS

BOQUILLAS HOT SPRINGS. Boquillas Hot Springs is a group of hot (41°C, 106°F) springs about two miles west of Rio Grande Village and five miles north of Boquillas in Big Bend National Park, southern Brewster County. An ancient people dug out a pit for bathing here, and bedrock mortars as well as rock paintings and smoke-blackened cliffs indicating the lengthy presence of native peoples may be seen in the area. When the Spaniard Pedro de Rábago y Terán visited the springs in 1747, he found the Apaches living in villages and growing squash plants. The Comanche Trail later passed the springs. For a time early in the twentieth century they were a popular bathing resort, and the water from the springs still flows into a walled-up pool. The springs are probably fed by surface-recharged water that circulates to a depth of about 700 meters, where it is heated; it then returns to the surface along faults and emerges from the Boquillas limestone on the bank of the Rio Grande. The rate of flow has been falling since the early twentieth century.

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